Immigrant’s book describes systemic cultural and racial discrimination in Quebec

Michelle Lalonde, THE GAZETTE07.18.2014

Luis Zuniga a Chilean-born Montrealer, who successfully took two different employers to the Human Rights Commission in the 1980s, has recently written a book chronicling his struggle.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Luis Zuniga a Chilean-born Montrealer, who successfully took two different employers to the Human Rights Commission in the 1980s, has recently written a book chronicling his struggle.Vincenzo D'Alto
/ The Gazette

Chilean-born computer technician Luis Zuniga first made local headlines back in 1988, when he took a Montreal school board to the Human Rights Commission after he was fired from his job there for speaking French with a Spanish accent.

He won that precedent-setting fight, but in 2000, he was back in court fighting cultural discrimination all over again, this time against two co-workers in Quebec’s Culture and Communication department.

In both cases, the commission ruled that Zuniga had been discriminated against because of his cultural background. But he was not reinstated in either job and in both cases, the people who had discriminated against him kept their jobs.

Now Zuniga has written a book called “Ton accent, Luis!” (published in French by Klempt édition) that chronicles his experience of the systemic cultural and racial discrimination which he says is rampant in Quebec.

The book is an eye-opening account of what it is like for someone from another culture trying to break into Quebec society. It is hard to say which is more disturbing: the details of overt racist comments Zuniga endured or the more subtle isolation he had to overcome to succeed.

For advocates of integration, Zuniga would appear to be a model immigrant. After leaving Chile for Montreal in 1977, he worked hard to learn French, got a degree in computer science at the Université du Québec à Montréal, married a Québécois woman and raised two children in French. His daughter is now a lawyer. His son is finishing a degree in administration at UQAM. Both are fluently trilingual.

Zuniga now speaks French fluently, albeit still with a strong Spanish accent of which he is not at all ashamed. (“It is part of my personality,” Zuniga insists.)

Back in 1988, after over a decade of working at menial jobs, Zuniga was hired by the Montreal Catholic School Commission as a computer technician. For a few weeks, things went well. At the time, he had a three-month-old daughter at home and his wife was not working, so Zuniga was relieved to finally get a job in his field with good pay and a chance of advancement.

He came home one day with good news; his supervisor had promoted him to being responsible for the computer system at MCSC headquarters. Two days later, the director summoned him to a meeting. Zuniga thought maybe it was to congratulate him on his promotion.

Instead, the director told him he was being fired because there had been complaints that people could not understand him on the phone because of his accent.

Zuniga was shattered, but he had the courage to take the case the Quebec Human Rights Commission, something many in his position would not even attempt. Eventually, after seven months of unemployment and using up his savings, he won the case. The board ruled that his firing was motivated only by cultural prejudice.

Although Zuniga got a settlement, he was not reinstated and the media attention his case had garnered made it harder for him to land another job.

“Nobody would hire me because they saw my case in the papers and assumed I was a problem employee ... That is what happens in these cases. The victim is assumed to be guilty, and the guilty parties are assumed to be victims.”

Zuniga eventually landed other jobs, and by 2000 he was working in the public sector again, this time for Quebec’s department of Culture and Communications. When two co-workers repeatedly made negative comments about his ethnic background, Zuniga went back to the Human Rights Commission and won an apology. But soon after that, he was let go, and he is convinced it was because of his complaint to the commission.

He went on to find other jobs, mostly in the private sector. Today Zuniga works for a communications company as a computer consultant. But he says he never quite got over the discrimination he suffered.

“Discrimination had a huge psychological impact on me and my family and nobody can fix that. It stays with you for life.”

Zuniga has managed, through years of struggle, to make a good life in Quebec for himself and his children, but he says Quebec society is losing, financially and culturally, by putting so many roadblocks in the paths of immigrants.

“Look at all the Arab taxi drivers who are doctors or engineers, all these PhDs working in cafés. It is systemic in Quebec. There is a lack of openness of spirit. We need to work all together if we are going to build a strong francophone society in North America, but it won’t work if everyone is isolated in their (ethnic) communities.”

Zuniga stresses that he has benefitted from the generosity and friendship of many old-stock Quebecers both in the workplace and outside it. But he says Quebec society can’t afford not to do a much better job of welcoming immigrants and defending their rights in the workplace.

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Immigrant’s book describes systemic cultural and racial discrimination in Quebec

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